Defining Actors and messages

Messages can be of arbitrary type (any subtype of Object). You can send boxed primitive values (such as String, Integer, Boolean etc.) as messages as well as plain data structures like arrays and collection types.

Hello World Actors use three different messages:

WhoToGreet: recipient of the greeting

Greet: instruction to execute greeting

Greeting: message containing the greeting

When defining Actors and their messages, keep these recommendations in mind:

Since messages are the Actor’s public API, it is a good practice to define messages with good names and rich semantic and domain specific meaning, even if they just wrap your data type. This will make it easier to use, understand and debug actor-based systems.

Messages should be immutable, since they are shared between different threads.

It is a good practice to put an actor’s associated messages as static classes in the class of the Actor. This makes it easier to understand what type of messages the actor expects and handles.

It is also a common pattern to use a static props method in the class of the Actor that describes how to construct the Actor.

Lets see how the Actor implementations for Greeter and Printer demonstrate these best practices.

The Greeter Actor

The following snippet from the Greeter.java implements the Greeter Actor:

The Greeter class extends the akka.actor.AbstractActor class and implements the createReceive method.

The Greeter constructor accepts two parameters: String message, which will be used when building greeting messages and ActorRef printerActor, which is a reference to the Actor handling the outputting of the greeting.

The receiveBuilder defines the behavior; how the Actor should react to the different messages it receives. An Actor can have state. Accessing or mutating the internal state of an Actor is fully thread safe since it is protected by the Actor model. The createReceive method should handle the messages the actor expects. In the case of Greeter, it expects two types of messages: WhoToGreet and Greet. The former will update the greeting state of the Actor and the latter will trigger a sending of the greeting to the Printer Actor.

The greeting variable contains the Actor’s state and is set to "" by default.

The static props method creates and returns a Props instance. Props is a configuration class to specify options for the creation of actors, think of it as an immutable and thus freely shareable recipe for creating an actor that can include associated deployment information. This example simply passes the parameters that the Actor requires when being constructed. We will see the props method in action later in this tutorial.

Printer Actor

The Printer implementation is very simple:

It creates a logger via Logging.getLogger(getContext().getSystem(), this);. By doing this we can write log.info() in the Actor without any additional wiring.

It just handles one type of message, Greeting, and logs the content of that message.